Last night’s sold-out Walkaway tour event with Laurie Penny at Waterstones Tottenham Court Road was spectacular (and not just because they had some really good whisky behind the bar), and the action continues today with a conversation with Olivia Sudjic tonight at Pages of Hackney, where we’ll be discussing her novel Sympathy as well as Walkaway.

Comcast’s agents, “Looking Glass Cyber Solutions” (formerly Cyveillance — the company changed its name after becoming notorious for sending bogus copyright notices) sent a legal threat to Fight for the Future, asserting that the site violated Comcast’s “valuable intellectual property rights” and demanding that the activist group hand over their domain to Comcast or face dire legal consequences.

Of course, there’s no way that Comcast would actually move forward with any legal action here. In fact, I’m pretty sure it already regrets the fact that the numbskulls at this vendor they hired to police their brand online just caused (yet another) massive headache for their brand online. Maybe, this time, Comcast will finally let Cyveillance/Looking Glass Cyber go, and find partners who don’t fuck up so badly. Meanwhile, the fact that Looking Glass Cyber can’t even figure out that Comcastroturf is a perfectly legal protest site makes the company’s website — which is chock full of idiotic buzzwords about “threat mitigation” and “threat intelligence” — look that much more ridiculous. The only “threat” here is Looking Glass/Cyveillance and their silly cluelessness sending out censorious threats based on what appears to be little actual research.

Of course, without true net neutrality, if Comcast really wanted to silence Comcastroturf, it would just block everyone from accessing the site…

In the wake of the Manchester bombing, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has become the first Prime Minister to activate “Operation Temperer,” a previously leaked, secret plan to put up to 5,000 armed soldiers into the streets of Britain, taking over daily security roles from police “such as concerts and sports matches.”

There’s no reason to believe that the Manchester bombing could have been prevented by the presence of armed soldiers, or that augmenting police numbers with armed soldiers charged with overseeing British civilians in British streets would help them to catch lone wolf bombers.

The Prime Minister said she was doing this to “celebrate those who helped, safe in the knowledge that the terrorists will never win – and our values, our country and our way of life will always prevail.”

So: she’s doing something that won’t stop future attacks and that is literally the mark of a military dictatorship, in order to stop attacks and preserve democratic values.

Checks out. And hey, Trump approves!

On Tuesday night Mrs May chaired a second Cobra meeting with members of her Cabinet and security officials after Salman Abedi was named as the suicide bomber.

She also spoke to world leaders, including Donald Trump, who offered their support following the attack.

“The president reassured the Prime Minister that Americans stand with the people of the United Kingdom and that our resolve will never waver in the face of terrorism,” his spokesman said.

“He offered American aid in the United Kingdom’s investigation and vowed to continue the mutual fight against terrorism.”

Theresa May won’t use the term “austerity” to describe her government’s policies, preferring the misleading phrase, “living within our means” — a term used to describe cuts to survival basics for millions of Britons, from housing to health to food to social care.

These policies have killed tens of thousands of Britons since they were enacted under May’s predecessor David Cameron, and her party manifesto going into the election promises more and worse, including a vicious dementia tax that she won’t talk straight about.

These policies don’t just affect the older voters that are the Tory base (though, unsurprisingly, they’re defecting in record numbers to the “unelectable” Labour Party who promise to reverse austerity, tax the rich, and renationalise the state industries that were sold off — often to foreign governments — who asset-stripped them, starved them of cash, and gouged Britons on their services).

Young, working-aged people won’t leave their ailing, benefit-capped parents to die on an ice-floe somewhere. They’ll take them in, support them with savings that could go to their kids’ eduction or their own mortgages. Young, working-aged people won’t shrug off cash-starved, segregated schools and send their kids there anyway: they’ll go into debt for private education, or give up on having kids altogether, lighting the fuse on a demographic bomb that goes off in a couple decades when today’s young working people become tomorrow’s pensioners with no generation behind them to keep the economy going.

Labour is polling its highest since the Brexit vote.

A decade of cuts, when added up, also means that some key agencies that protect us, such as the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency will have been decimated by up to 60% of funding cuts. Scaling back on an already paltry funding in these critical areas of regulation will lead to a rise in pollution related illness and disease and will fail to ensure people are safe at work.

The economic folly is that austerity will cost society more in the long term. Local authorities are, for example, housing people in very expensive temporary accommodation because the government has disinvested in social housing. The crisis in homelessness has paradoxically led to a £400 million rise in benefit payments. The future costs of disinvesting in young people will be seismic.

Ending austerity would mean restoring our system of social protection and restoring the spending power of local authorities. It would mean, as all the political parties except the Conservatives recognise, taxing the rich, not punishing the poor in order to pay for a problem that has its roots in a global financial system that enriched the elite. It would also mean recognizing that the best way to prevent the worsening violence of austerity and to rebuild the economy is to re-invest in public sector jobs.

I was very lucky to grow up with little shame in my household; the fact that my parents are former flower children probably has a lot to do with that. I was never taught to be ashamed of being a sexual human. They never told me that being gay was bad. Promiscuity itself was rarely judged, though I was taught that I should care about the people with whom I have sex. I wasn’t taught that masturbation was wrong. It was just a thing people do. It wasn’t outright encouraged, but it was just a human thing.

When I was about twelve or thirteen, my sister gave me the masturbation talk one night, much to my surprise. I don’t think my parents put her up to it. I’m sure my dad would’ve figured out how to bring it up if it were an issue. She was already out of the house and on her own; she’s ten years older than me. Maybe she was visiting for a holiday or something. She was fixing her hair and makeup in the bathroom. I kept her company. We became closer and closer throughout my teens, especially as my parents had rough times in their marriage. My sister was always there to rescue me.

She casually rolled a strip of blond hair around her curling iron.“Have you started masturbating yet?”

The honest answer was Yes, every day! Sometimes two or three times! but what I said in my gobstopped shock was, “No! No. Uh-uh.”

“It’s fine if you do. It’s normal. Just keep it to yourself.” She applied some eyeliner. The dexterity needed to operate a curling iron while applying eye makeup is beyond me. I can’t even play drums.

I’m not sure why she brought masturbation up and then suggested I keep it to myself. Had I been talking about it? Maybe I’d been overheard talking to friends. Maybe I’d left evidence. Who knows. I’d probably left a lot of evidence.

But that’s about the extent of shame in my house: “Keep it to yourself.” I was never given the impression I was a bad person for anything I did. This context is essential for readers to understand my feelings about queer sex and and gender. All of these were considered okay in my family. My parents didn’t want me to be gay or genderqueer, but they’re very supportive. My sister loves it, and she tells me I’m the best parts of having a brother and a sister. She has another brother from her dad (we have different fathers), but she never got to have a sister. She likes to put side-by-side pics of her other brother and me on Facebook, the linebacker mowing the lawn with his shirt off, me luxuriating in a fur coat. Not that I’m against mowing the lawn with my shirt off, mind you. Totes masc, bro.

I’m grateful for my loving, supportive family. I bring this up because I got through life with much less internalized homophobia than a lot of queer people have. That’s important for the following conversation. I’m in no way a fluke, but the shame around sex and being queer is a powerful block to things like self care, which includes PrEP and other forms of prevention.

The internalized homophobia is still there, mind you; I question my gender presentation on most days. Do I look too faggy? Should I act more masculine in a certain situation? Will I be a target for violence? Should I decide to do a butch look for a certain party rather than a femme or genderfuck look? I pray to Saint David Bowie, and he tells me to be strong and do it 100%, no half-steppin’.

There is still a huge amount of shame among queer people. It’s picked up everywhere, from the family home to the church to the social climate of school and the street. I learned most of my self-doubt and homophobia at school, since we had gays in the family and my folks never once took me to a church or synagogue.

I encounter plenty of guys online and in person who have no qualms about PrEP, but I’ve also meet a lot of guys who refuse to take it. This is a separate group from the guys who come across as calm and confident that PrEP isn’t right for them after giving it some practical thought. That group is growing, or so I’ve observed. However, the men who absolutely refuse to take PrEP are a separate cohort.

Of these guys, about a third tell me that they’re against taking pharmaceuticals in general. They don’t trust Big Pharma, or they’re into naturopathic alternatives, or they just don’t like taking any drug they don’t absolutely need. I sympathize with this group. I went through the same qualms in deciding whether to get on PrEP.

The other two-thirds of the PrEP dissidents have offered many different excuses:
“I don’t participate in risky behavior very often.”
“PrEP is for guys who just want to bareback and have lots of partners.”
“I’m afraid of how it might change my behavior.”
“No one needs PrEP! Why don’t people just use a condom every time?”

Behind every one of these statements is the same basic sentiment: I don’t want to feel ashamed of myself or my actions. Put another way: I’m afraid PrEP will make me a dirty slut, and then I’ll judge myself.

Heaven help us. I hear all sorts of dressed-up excuses, and again and again they all come back to the same thing. People are afraid that PrEP will somehow convince them they’re invincible, and that being invincible means they’ll end up in the park late at night with their pants down, touching their toes, with a sign taped to their ass that says, “Please fuck me like the nasty little piggy that I am.” Not that they’d ever do that without PrEP. Surely not.

The real underlying fear here isn’t that they’ll become promiscuous. The actual fear is of the shame they’ll experience if they become promiscuous.

HIV has only made the shame situation worse. Gay people don’t merely deal with shame over being attracted to the same sex. Gay men are not just ashamed of actually having sex with another man. We also get ashamed that we did something risky to our health. Thanks a lot, AIDS crisis.

The shame is compounded—the desire, the activity, and the perceived lack of health precaution, all layering to become a McShamewich of neuroses. Plus that extra layer about not being masculine enough. You wonder why gay guys can be so neurotic? It’s because for over thirty years we were told that our sexual orientation is so effectively destructive that it will not only send us to Hell, it’ll be the very thing that kills us.

See another example: on the apps, particularly on Scruff, a lot of guys use the term “clean” when they mean they’ve tested negative for all STIs. “Clean”— the opposite of dirty, marked, or unsanitary. The implications are clear.

The backlash against the term “clean” has also been palpable. There was a meme for a while of guys taking their profile pic in the shower, a social campaign to recognize that “clean” doesn’t mean “disease free” just as “dirty” doesn’t mean “diseased.” It sure is easy to judge sexual behavior when there’s a deadly disease being spread by sex—except that HIV isn’t deadly anymore if you have access to proper care.

That’s actually part of the threat that PrEP represents: people are so attached to their shame around unprotected or promiscuous sex, and PrEP means they’ll have to find a new excuse to judge themselves and others for any mildly risky behavior. Oops! I gave you head on the first date, and I accidentally bit my lip this morning—I hope you don’t give me AIDS. Now I hate myself. Don’t look at me ever again. Get out.

I know that I cling to the things that scare me and hurt me sometimes; clinging to them is familiar. It’s easier to sit idle and be afraid that I’ll never make it as an author, rather than to actually write a book. It’s easier to be afraid of HIV than to learn how it actually works, how to prevent it, and all the many options available. I see other gay men clinging to the fear of HIV and shame around sex, and rejecting PrEP is a way of holding onto those fears and shames rather than resolving them.

Taking Truvada is the exact opposite of sexual recklessness. Taking Truvada daily is precisely an act of sexual responsibility, whether you combine it with condoms or not.

Fox News and Reuters report that U.S. President Donald Trump has retained New York-based trial attorney Marc Kasowitz to defend him in the escalating federal investigations involving Russia, espionage suspicions, and possible criminal activities.

Kasowitz has represented Trump for over 15 years, and is known as a litigator, not a criminal defense lawyer.

He currently also represents OJSC Sberbank of Russia, the nation’s largest bank, which is charged in an open U.S. federal court case of conspiring with granite company executives and others to raid the assets of a competitor.

[caption id=”attachment_525692″ align=”alignnone” width=”2000″] From 2005: Marc Kasowitz speaks to reporters after a jury found the New York and New Jersey Port Authority negligent in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, in New York October 26, 2005. The jury found port authorities negligent for failing to prevent the 1993 truck bombing at the World Trade Center, possibly triggering a raft of new lawsuits and millions of dollars in damages. REUTERS [/caption]

The outside counsel would be separate from the White House Counsel’s Office, led by Donald McGahn.

Mueller was appointed as special counsel by the Justice Department last week to investigate the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia. Several congressional committees and the FBI are also investigating the matter.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in January that Moscow tried to sway the November vote in Trump’s favor. Russia has denied involvement, and Trump has denied any collusion between his campaign and Russia.

The Federal Communications Commission will not take any action in response to complaints over the May 1 broadcast of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” in which Colbert said in his opening monologue, “the only thing [Trump’s] mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c— holster.”

Some of the complaints that came in to the FCC argued Colbert’s joke was “homophobic.”

“Sir, you attract more skinheads than free Rogaine,” Colbert said near the end of the insult-laden rant. “You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a sign language gorilla that got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c–k holster.” The final remark has drawn the internet’s ire, with viewers taking to social media to declare Colbert is homophobic.The hashtag #FireColbert began spreading around Twitter, along with calls for people to boycott sponsors of the late-night show.

“Consistent with standard operating procedure, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau has reviewed the complaints and the material that was the subject of these complaints,” the FCC statement reads. “The Bureau has concluded that there was nothing actionable under the FCC’s rules.”

Colbert’s remark was bleeped out of the broadcast and his mouth was blurred.

The FCC’s conclusion means that it found that Colbert’s remark did not rise to the level of obscenity or indecency to warrant any kind of sanction or fine. That appeared to be highly unlikely, given the circumstances. Broadcasters have a safe harbor for indecent or profane content between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., although they can face penalties for airing obscene content at any hour.

Several days after the broadcast, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai was asked about complaints over the remarks, and he said that they would be looked into. All complaints are reviewed by the FCC, but the agency does not monitor programming.